Books misc.

• While picking up the second two volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, I stumbled across Jonathan Bate's new biography of John Clare. While there are a number of "edited" Clare texts available on the Web, with non-authorial punctuation added, I very much prefer Clare bare, as it were. Compare, for example, "An Invite to Eternity" without and with added accidentals. While readers are to a certain extent left at sea when poetry is mostly or entirely unpunctuated--it's more difficult to determine stress patterns or pauses, for example--such poetry also gives the impression of being permanently in process. It's as though the reader has intercepted or interrupted the poem, which appears to continue before and after it actually appears on the page.

• One of my favorite publishers, Broadview Press, has all sorts of interesting editions in the pipeline, including a new anthology of Victorian short fiction, Maria Edgeworth's philosemitic novel Harrington, excerpts from The Girl's Own Paper and Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy, and so forth. Not everything is in their online catalogue yet; to see the full range, do a publisher search at Amazon.co.uk (not US Amazon) and order results by publication date.

• An interesting book for Victorianists that might not quite be on your radar screens: Simon Goldhill's Who Needs Greek? (Cambridge, 2002). Goldhill's cultural history of Hellenism's meanings and values mostly draws on Victorian and early Modernist examples, although he deals with classical texts (Lucian, Plutarch) at some length as well. If you're interested in literary history, Goldhill's attempt to practice what he calls a study of "cultural forgetting" (as opposed to cultural memory) is particularly worth pondering.